Today, we attended a scrimmage that team 8565, Technic Bots, graciously invited us to. The point of this scrimmage was to get some time seeing the changes which the other Worlds-advancing NTX teams had implemented, and to get some ideas of strategies and alliances. This was the first time we were able to get proper driver practice with the newly designed Transfer Plate...
A small change can make a huge difference: we have learned that we really should have put the shoulder spring back in place after we rebuilt Taubot. The Crane arm fails to maintain its shoulder angle, and this is an issue which has only started since we built Tau2. We're...
Today, we did drive practice, and worked out some of the smaller issues with transfer.
While doing robot testing, the servo on the underarm shoulder joint broke. We took apart the joint in order to fix the servo, but the servo's gearbox was not accessible, rendering us unable to diagnose the problem, so we had to replace the old servo with a...
Trey redesigned the gripper stopper on the underarm to limit the degrees of movement so that the underarm gripper will not get stuck. The original design of the gripper stopper did not fully stop the gripper because it did not limit the gripper's movement as much as we wanted it to.
The tensioning belt on the...
This weekend, Iron Reign participated in the FTC UIL Championship, which was mainly robot game, and the FTC Texas State tournament, where we advanced to FTC Worlds with the Think award, an award granted for the engineering portfolio and documentation. We learned a lot from our gameplay and...
This past week we participated in the FTC state championship and UIL state competition in Belton, Texas. Overall, we were successful, winning the Think Award at State and thus advancing to Worlds despite less-than-ideal robot performance. First, we will discuss judging and then transition into our game-by-game...
Finally back from a much-needed break after regionals, the team got back together for a more strategy-focused meeting, and we did some preliminary work on code, build, and portfolio.
To help us use our time efficiently, we focused the first couple hours of the meeting on planning. We created...
Today, team 6832 met with Jason Treadway, Head of the Dallas College STEM Institute and a former structural engineer. We virtually presented our robot and outreach efforts and were able to both intrigue him and received important input from him.
Overall, Mr....
This past Saturday, team 6832 Iron Reign participated in the NTX Regionals Championship at Marcus High School. Overall, despite some robot performance issues, we won the Motivate award, meaning we advanced to both the UIL State Championship and FTC State Championship. Today, 2 days after the competition, we had our Regionals Post-Mortem, and...
Today, Iron Reign participated at the NTX Regional Championship in Flower Mound. Even with major robot performance issues, we were still able to advance to both the UIL State Championship and the FTC State Championship by winning the Motivate award after a strong presentation and portfolio showing. We ended up with...
With regionals just 4 days away, we had a lot to work on for TauBot2. Today, we focused on implementing a new Joint class in all of our joints in the UnderArm, soldered wires for the new Shoulder and turret assembly, and continued to wire the robot.
One issue that we had run...
To start we began to bring the wiring for the UnderArm through our wiring sleeve. The current UnderArm wiring situation was less than ideal and it needed to be reworked. About half of our UnderArm’s wires were in a wire sleeve and today we added...
With the Regional competition coming up quite soon, we needed to get to work finishing up the build for TauBotV2, optimizing the code with new inverse kinematics for the double-jointed UnderArm, finishing up some subsystem blog posts, and practicing and preparing our presentation.
With a heavily below-par performance than the Tournament...
Inverse kinematics is the process of finding the joint variables needed for a kinematic chain to reach a specified endpoint. In the context of TauBot2, inverse kinematics, or IK is used in the crane and the UnderArm. In this blog post, we'll be focused on the implementation of IK in the UnderArm.
The goal of this...
With our primary game strategy for this season being to limit our movement around the playing field, the ability to quickly and easily rotate our intake and deposit systems is vital. Additionally, the ability to reach a variety of poles and scoring options is also crucial if we are to remain stationary. This is why we implemented...
First off, we began assembling and wiring the UnderArm system. In the process of putting the UnderArm together, we ran into a couple of hurdles. The alignment on our parts was incredibly difficult to get right, and in the process of aligning them,...
Today was another day of onboarding recruits. For the next few weeks, along with regional preparation, we will be focused on the transfer of knowledge from seniors to recruits. Today the recruits shadowed the senior Iron Reign members, Trey and Gabriel.
Gabriel was working on TauBot 2. Trey was working on...
Today, Iron Reign presented at the DISD Stem Expo in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center. Here, we both demoed TauBot and hosted a STEM activity for young children which involved building LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robots and then battling them SUMO style in a battle hexagon.
While this event was a great opportunity...
Today we onboarded most of the new recruits and continued to work on fixing our broken shoulder from the last tournament. We also organized a lot of the RoboDojo and brainstormed more ideas for how we can reach out to professionals to better prepare for the upcoming Regionals...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams competed in the D&U League Tournament at Woodrow Wilson High School, the culmination of the previous three qualifiers. Overall, we did pretty well, winning both Inspire 1 and Think 2, which means we will be directly advancing to the Regional competition in about a month. There...
The past three weeks have been incredibly eventful, as we try to beat the clock and finish TaBbot: V2. We had a lot of work to do in build and code, since we were putting together an entirely new robot, coding it, and getting it competition-ready...
Today, Iron Reign and our two sister teams participated in the 3rd League Meet for the U League at UME Preparatory for qualification going into the Tournament next week. Overall, we did solid, going 4-2 at the meet; however, we lost significant tiebreaker points in autonomous points due...
You can watch our full presentation here. Today was our second meeting with Dallas Personal Robotics Group , or DPRG, this season. We updated the engineers at DPRG with our build and code progress. First, we ran through our newly assembled parts and subsystems. Then we showed our work in progress CAD in...
Today,we focused mainly on documentation and the continued CAD for the next iteration of TauBot. We worked on the outreach and Motivate sections of the Engineering Portfolio along with a few of the preliminary slides. Furthermore, we also made sure that the blog was all up to date.
On the CAD side of things, we finished the shoulder drive on the CAD model and began...
Today we focused on building and modeling our second iteration of Toubot. After designing and cutting out the parts for the underarm on the CNC we began assembly.
As for modeling, we worked on the shoulder drive for Toubot2. We are redesigning our motor mounts because we need the extension on the arm to be stronger. We are changing the design for the shoulder drive...
Recently, Vance implemented a new control scheme : scoring patterns. This required some changes to the way the cone is “transported” throughout the field when the driver operated, and we found it was best to “fly the gripper” by controlling the 3 dimensional position of the cone on a cartesian space superimposed on the field. Basically, we control the x,y,z, which is a big change compared to the...
Today, we virtually presented our robot to the Dallas Personal Robotics Group(DPRG) to showcase our progress for this season and hopefully get advice on our robot's design, code, and presentation. DPRG is a group of engineers and robot enthusiasts who meet multiple times a...
This was a great opportunity for us...
We implemented inverse kinematics with driver controls, auton, and the memory system. We changed the driver controls to use height and distance rather than angle and shoulder. This makes it faster and much easier for the drivers to fine tune adjustments when dropping and picking up...
Today we worked on finishing the nudge stick and auton code, along with doing driver practice and other preparations for the upcoming meet.
We finished working on code for the nudge stick so it will rotate to the left or right of the pole in order to help the driver align the cone with the pole more easily and quickly....
We partially remade the joint that connects the extension part of the crane to the turret, as we found that under high stress the gears were prone to slipping. We also changed the gear ratios on the shoulder to increase the torque produced at the cost of the speed of the crane. We did this because under most situations we were hitting the...
We spent today's meeting fixing minor build problems, then ran timed practice matches. Additionally, we started modeling the prototype for the nudge stick.
We fine tuned the PID and speed, as well as the pickup and drop speed and staging. We also fixed the odometry, which calculates the position of the robot based on how...
The League Meet was a rude awakening for all the things we needed to improve upon and start. This includes a better autonomous, as other leagues are already having regular 30-40 point autonomous programs, documentation as even though League Meets don’t require them, the Tournament is slowly encroaching...
1st Match - The first round went horribly wrong, as Gabriel touched the phone after randomization, netting a minor penalty. While autonomous did read the April Tags, the arm was outside the tile, so regardless we didn’t score the 20 points...
The day before a competition always sees arguably the most productivity from all the teams in a rush to finish up what they hope to accomplish the next day. For Reign, this was getting autonomous working, final drive practice for Georgia, and the printing of the team beacons.
The first few hours were filled with commits from...
We fixed the turret heading PID so that it does not spin uncontrollably when the angle changes from 359 to 0, and adjusted and tuned ticks per inch. We integrated memory of drop off and pickup positions with the crane so our drives don't have to spend a lot of time precisely aligning the arm with the cones and...
The LED battery holder from the previous meeting snapped, requiring us to rebend and make a new gate for the LED Battery holder from scratch, which took a bit of time. In addition to this, all the set screws on the robot for the shaft collars and the pulley systems, as well as using threadlocker on the right motor mount in...
In tandem with yesterday, the main goal of this meeting was to improve upon the robot after the Screamage. This consisted of two main aspects, being a new way to mount the pulley because of the set screw of the motor that kept untightening from the axel and falling off at the most inopportune times, and a new battery holder for the...
After the Screamage, many different problems became apparent, including the fact that the robot just barely fit sizing requirements. In order to combat this, we decided to cut off .75 inches off the arm extension from the carbon fiber rod and added a new hole for the mount for the gripper system, which didn’t have an effect on the code or presets. Trey also continued...
Today was mainly focused on getting proper drive practice and getting the path following for the April Tags to go to the correct locations. As such, in between commits, our drivers Leo and Georgia were able to get some familiarity with the controls, while our coders Vance and David worked on PID tuning and autonomous corrections.
Our main coders, Vance and David, have continued working on reqriting the code base to make it easier to understand. We have many new recruits on our sister teams who are interested in learning...
As a base robot, we started with an 18 inch cubic frame. This was the frame we'd most easily be able to modify and build upon as we progressed further into the year. For an initial brainstorming session, our Robot in Two Days would let us get some ideas into place which we...
Today was the season's official kick off the 2022-2023 game, Power Play! However, Gabriel, one of our members, gave a wonderful keynote speech, taking inspiration from Steve Jobs, for the reveal of our Mechavator.
Our first thoughts when we saw the new game, which is about capping yellow poles mounted on springs throughout the game...
To gain more members for our sister teams, Team 15373, Iron Core, and Team 3734, Pandemonium, we held an interest meeting at Townview Magnet Center earlier today. It was crucial to get more members so we could continue the Iron Reign legacy for the future years, as our members are all from our sister teams.
Our new sponsor, Mr.Florczak,...
At the FLYSET Workshop, hosted by team 8565, Technicbots, and team 20313, Mustang Robotics, we were tasked with introducing our remote controlled excavator, Mechavator, to the advance track attendees.
Gabriel was tasked with making the presentation and script for the workshop, in which we would also include teasers about our video, Duck Hunt. Each of us were...
Earlier this afternoon, at TAG's flight school event for new freshmen, Iron Reign had a club booth for all the new freshmen to check out. There was a quick recruitment presentation for all the people who showed interest. Potential members also received information about the first meeting at our offsite location. Recruitment efforts like these are important to fill up our...
This morning, Iron Reign demoed at the Dallas City Learning event at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, which had over 550 attendees. This fair featured STEAM activities from local organizations and the museum, along with local industry professionals.
At this event, we demonstrated our previous year’s...
With the limits of our current workspace reached and the need to expand with more recruits and machinery; Iron Reign set off on a new summer project. The objective: design a new workspace for Iron Reign to be constructed further into the property. This new workshop would help Iron Reign improve our fabrication and machining capabilities and expand our program. It also served...
This marks our final competition of the Freight Frenzy season.
Trey, Georgia, Ben and Gabriel got in their last couple hours of drive practice at the RoboDojo. Knowing this was our last time we would be able to practice in our home field, we made sure that we...
After six broken servos amounting to around 240 dollars worth of funding, it became apparent that the current model of servo we were using wasn't up to the task that it needed to fulfill.
First came the issue of figuring out how to mount the motor. An HdHex Motor was decided upon as it was able to support additions to increase...
We took some time out of our week to get in some drive practice at Woodrow so we would be able to practice working together with another team and collaborating with a make-shift alliance.
Practice matches run: 16 The main purpose of our drive practice at Woodrow was getting drive practice with another...
This Saturday Iron Reign attended the scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This scrimmage was for many rookies, the first exposure to a competition environment and the basic structures of team communication. Both the rookies and the returning team members had an...
Today, Iron Reign competed in the DISD scrimmage at Hedrick Middle School. This was the first scrimmage of the year, so experienced teams and rookie teams alike struggled to get a working robot on the field. We go to this scrimmage every year, and it helps us gage just how much needs to be done...
We were helping our school's FRC team clean out their parts closet, which hadn't been cleaned in 10-ish years. Under the layers and layers of FRC junk, we found an Apple II-operated Patterson/Paxton CNC Milling Set. These were meant to run off of a long-since-gone Apple II in a classroom setting. But, it had long been auctioned off, leaving the set useless. But,...
The generic engineering journal rubric given to teams by FIRST heavily recomends having a season-summary intro page at the front of the journal. As well, every winning example journal includes the summary. So, we figured out that it might be a good idea to actually make one.
Iron Reign has been a FIRST team, in one form or another, for eight years....
In November, we went to a Oklahoman qualifier in Mustang. The reason for this was purely strategic - by competing in multiple regions, we have more chances of advancing, as well as having more in-tournament experience overall. There, we got 2nd-place Inspire and advanced to the Oklahoma Regionals. Then, when we came back to Dallas,...
It was a cold and dark morning. The howling winds of a cold front rushed through the grass. Under this cover of darkness, one car after another pulled up to a house, dimly lit. A car door would open for a second, letting a child out into the cold night. Under these auspicous conditions,...
After making significant development on our robot, we decided to model it. So far, we have developed the chassis of the robot seen below
To develop this, many types of contraints were used.
The entire model is dependent on this tetrix bar. The bar was constrainted using the Default feature since it was the base of the model. To this, the lift...
We have finally completed assembly modeling Kraken, Iron Reign's Relic Recovery robot. Named after the sea creature due to the robot's OCTOPUCKERS, Kraken stands as a fierce competitor in FTC.
To the chassis, we added the glyph system mounting. We first designed a linear slide replica and constrained that to a small TETRIX U connector piece which attached to the REV rail base. On the other side...
Since we're in the last weeks of December, our schools are legally obligated to let us out. And, while colleges aren't legally mandated to let their students out, they tend to do so, as not doing that would rather enrage their students and families. So, due to this fortuitous coincidence, us simple FTC students were able...
This past weekend, Iron Reign hosted a 28-team qualifier at Townview Magnet Center. Many of us attend the School of Science and Engineering inside Townview, so it was familiar territory and made the whole experience a little easier. We were lucky enough to host a Scrimmage as practice for our actual qualifier. Weeks of preparation and anticipation paid...
Even though we did very well in the Oklahoma qualifier, we still encountered several problems, that if not addressed, could lower our chances of getting to Super-Regionals. So, we had a team discussion on what to do differently in the next tournament, and what to keep constant.
Once done, our postmortem post will be here.
On Nov. 17, we went to the Oklahoma Mustang HS qualifier. Our strategy for this tournament was to attempt to qualify in multiple regions so that we have more chances to get to the South Super Regionals. For...
Since Iron Reign is hosted in our coaches' house, we only have so much space. Even though we've basically taken over their house, a consequence of that is that we don't really have a place to put the field...until now.
In prior posts, we've talked about building a pool deck to store our field, and its finally become a...
So, we were absolute failures. There's no way to get around that. We got 14th place out of 14, and our presentation flopped. But, its not the end of the world, even if it may feel like it. We have another qualifier in Oklahome in one week, and we need to analyze what we did wrong...
Any well-versed team understands that, depending on the competition for the year, a robot will either be modified to compete or be built from the ground up. In any case, however, a robot often starts at its chassis, and teams have multiple companies that provide solutions to the common robot chassis’ needs and specifications. To name a few: AndyMark® has its standard kits that include all the...
Today we started the task of building the field, which we received for free, thanks to DISD and their generous donation. The first task Charlotte, Austin, Karina worked on was assembling the balancing stones and the cryptoboxes. While building the field we ran into a few difficulties. First, when we were making the balancing stone, we accidentally had on the cover plate on...
Iron Reign has been a team for 8+ years now through multiple competitions. We started as a wee middle school FLL team at W.B. Travis, and we've grown exponentially since then. We've competed in MoonBots and FTC, represented our school at SuperRegionals, presented at the National Science Teachers' Association covention, and built our own RV in order to serve underpriveledged communities accross the Dallas Metroplex. But, after the current original team members...
Dear Iron Reign,
8 years ago, when I walked into Mr. Schulte’s room after school, I didn’t realize my life was about to change dramatically. I’d heard there was a robotics club which was attempting to be started. I’d had sparse experience with the subject, through extraneous events like the annual Engineering Saturday at UTA, so I decided to give it a shot. When I walked through that door on the second floor, I didn’t realize I would find my second family and grow...
layout: Do not touch. title: Title of your article (you can't use hyphens or colons.) tags: Enter as comma seperated list, case insensitive. Try to use one award and one normal tag
Hooray for graduation! Sort of. As we seniors write our farewell blog posts before we head to college, we have a lot of years to think about. In my case, I only have my 4 years of high school to pull from, but that's more than enough to express my gratitude for being on this team. I've learned so much in so many different areas, and not just scientific ones. I've learned...
Well... this is somewhat of a bittersweet moment for me. All of us seniors are leaving for college in hopes of spreading our horizons and making something of ourselves, but we're leaving this team that has become almost a second family. It's been a good few years since I first joined this team and I never thought that I would even make it to this point. I've learned so much in...
Many members were out of town this break but we still managed to make a good deal of progress. What we forgot to do was post about it. Github kept track of code edits and we have other records of the practices, so we have a list of 11 articles to be written by this Sunday at the latest. Tomorrow's practice (Saturday March...
Scouting:
Good
Bad
Notes: While we did well with scouting, it could have gone off much better. We made some mistakes...
On Febuary 25, we drove our RV to W.E. Pete Ford Middle School, in Allen, TX. The tournament was split into two divisions, and for many of our members, this was our first time encountering that layout. We didn't have any of our team members going to Dean's List interviews this time. We still didn't have an...
In our competitions we really can't rely on our robot performing as well as it does in practice and our sparring matches with Imperial. If we're going to increase our chances of advancing from Regionals to Super-Regionals 90% of the time it's going to be from judging. We've always had rocky presentations in my opinion, but this year we're getting our energy...
This year, to give our team a better chance of going to super-regionals for the first time, we decided to enter the Arkansas regional. We were actually pretty far ahead compared to our last seasons. We had a finished robot, a working autonomous, and good drivers.
To Arkansas...
I remember, vaguely, that someone on our team wanted to add a post counter for all the posts people appear in. And, today, I did it out of sheer boredom. And, here it is.
{% assign eh = 1 %} {% assign dc = 1 %} {% assign ed = 1 %} {% assign or = 1 %} {% assign js = 1 %} {% assign cr = 1 %} {%...
A bit of background: UIL is a Texas-specific organization that hosts competitions in both academic and athletic pursuits. This year, they ran a pilot program for Robotics, using the FTC rules and field from Res-Q. About 72 teams competed in the FTC-based competition, which then was split into two catagories. Unlike regular FIRST tournaments, the awards not earned by competition are given through nomination by other teams.
So as I've made changes to the blog I've realized that not everyone understands the little rules or guidelines I've made, but never quite explained. Following is a mock post, the content is a guide on what to put in each section.
Our main weakness in previous years had been our presentation. This year, we plan to change that. When our team was solely FLL, we practiced our presentations beforehand, so, we're applying that to this year. We've done 2-3 presentations so far and it seems it really helps us. As well, we're making a powerpoint presentation to assist us, giving us information we might forget and providing a visual...
In a rough order, here are the things I've worked on in the blog over the past month or so:
We rarely prepare enough for awards, usually hoping the practice before that we've done enough to be in the running. Last year we won the PTC Creo award at one competition, but that was a one time deal. This year we can prepare our journal in such a way to make it easier for judges to find what they're looking for when deciding. 
Out of the 9 awards, 7 are given at every tournament....
We've been tagging each blog post as we write them according to topics we think they fall into, but there's been no standard for what to choose from. For example, what I tag as "Mechanical" Omar tags as "Build." When we get some scripting done on the blog to separate according to topic we will need consistency between everybody.
So far these are the tags chosen to represent main topics and types...
Today, we reviewed opmodes in the FTC API and how to register new opmodes. We also learned about the differences between regular, linear and synchronous (from SwerveRobotics) opmodes.
Our Blog == our Journal. What we also did today was quickly review how to create blog entries so we can do that more frequently this year. We also tried to catch up on our lengthy backlog of journal articles. We were very busy...
